"I only know to ask questions"
-- Nagesh to Sivaji in "Thiruvilayadal"

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Excerpts from Wikipedia:

Bisexuality is a sexual orientation which refers to the romantic and/or sexual attraction of individuals to other individuals of both their own and the opposite sex or gender.

Bisexual people are not necessarily attracted equally to both sexes.

In 1995, Harvard Shakespeare professor Marjorie Garber made the academic case for bisexuality with her 600-page Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life in which she argued that most people would be bisexual if not for "repression, religion, repugnance, denial...premature specialization.

Sigmund Freud theorized that every person has the ability to become bisexual at some time in his or her life.

There is the following ambiguity in the definition of bisexuality. Is it sexual/romantic attraction towards members of both sexes (or) is it sexual/romantic attraction towards both masculine and femine ideals. The definition in wikipedia seems to point to the former.

This distinction is important. For example, a man M can be sexually/romantically attracted to a feminine ideal; but, in practice, some men may exhibit some of the charecterestics that are a part of that feminine ideal, and consequently, in practice he (M) may be attracted to such men. According to wiki's definition this would make this man bisexual. It seems to me that this man is not an exception, but the common case(?)

I know I have not considered the second definition in detail; I have not even defined what I mean by a masculine/feminine sex ideal.

Fellini, the italian director, considers all art to be autobiographical. I am not claiming my blogposts are a work of art; but neither are they entirely autobiographical, some are just thought experiments.

I have thought abt the comma in tamil language before. I am not sure, but I think there was no comma (or a full stop) in early tamil literature. Nowadays people use it even in literary texts. It is worth noting that comma and fullstop are essentially some symbols that serve as delimiters and the simple (but inefficient) technique of going to the next line will serve the purpose.

we first need to find when English started using comma. Was it after the invention of the press or even before that. --------------------------------According to wiki article on comma, "The comma was one of the first punctuation marks. In the 3rd century BCE, Aristophanes of Byzantium invented a system of single dots (distinctiones) that separated verses..."

But the press also played its part in standardising it. "The mark used today is descended from a diagonal slash, or virgula suspensiva ( / ), used from the 13th to 17th centuries to represent a pause, notably by Aldus Manutius" (Italian printer)

I think it might be better to separate language from punctuations.

I think, the future of punctuations also will be interesting to follow. I will not be surprised if things like ":)" ":(" are added.